I try not to overdue it with Big Dig items here, but I think that a lot of people are still very angry about the whole thing. Maybe not to the degree that they were in the immediate aftermath of the ceiling collapse, but the anger is still there.

So interestingly enough, an AP story today notes Bechtel has been dropped from a hospital project in Iraq because of missed deadlines and cost overruns. The company blames both on the security issues of operating in Iraq. I guess that would have been a great excuse here too, if only there had been a civil war going on in downtown Boston.

Meanwhile the feds now want to conduct a multi-million dollar parallel audit of the entire Big Dig. I wonder which contractor they'll pick to do the job and how many cost overruns the audit itself will develop.

Questions are being raised about the authenticity of that 'smoking gun' memo, allegedly written by a safety officer on the connector project and exposed by The Globe.

And least but not last, the Herald reports that the traffic backups resulting from tunnel closures are hurting business for escorts. They don't miss a thing over there. (But why are reporters monitoring sites like these to begin with?)

In addition to impacting escorts, the traffic was blamed, this week, for the death of a man being transported by ambulance, although some questions are being raised (by Dan Kennedy) about that as well.

On the blog front, at BMG, Charley suggests that Amorello was a scapegoat and that we have bigger fish to fry. Agreed, but not having Matt to kick around anymore at least takes away a distraction so that we can now start to focus on the real bad guys. And Romney won't have the Matt issue to fall back on if being in charge of the Big Dig crisis starts to become a liability.

Speaking of Romney and the BD, Aaron doesn't think the association will become a liability for Romney now that Amorello's gone. We'll see. Jon Keller has some thoughts on this and he links to a Channel 4 I-Team (are they still doing that?) report that implicates Romney in some past problems. But Jay Fitzgerald gives Romney credit for at least, "aggressively taking charge."